Scream (I)

November 17, 2009

Scream has picked up the ideas of horror, thriller, crime, mystery and mixed them all up together as a one good film. Apart from the fact that it is a horror/ thriller film, this film is also added a little sense of humors within itself as well. To compare with the last film we have watched it class together, the original halloween, it is obvious to see that as time went by, there are many elements that have been changed and developed. For example, Scream is way bloodier than Halloween, the household technology becomes one of the important subject in the film. Even though we had some scenes that showed the use of telephone in Halloween (when Laurie is picking a phone and hearing her friend dying but she actually though her friend was having sex).

However, the telephone becomes much more powerful in Scream as it is how the killers use to reach to their victims. Another thing that makes Scream different from Halloween is that all the main characters do have inner conflicts and back stories. Sidney Prescott, Billy Loomis and Gale Weathers are sharing this same linked back story and which the audience get to understand it at the end of the film.

But there are also rules of the horror film that both Scream and Halloween did follow perfectly the example for this is the idea of the virginity. All the innocent ones get to survive and the rest just have to die. The idea of using government (in this case ‘the police officer) as a symbolic of something incapable, Dewey is nice but somehow he always accidentally shocked other characters in Scream, he is also sort of hopeless, he does not help anything or anyone really. We as the audience always get the sense of how his sister, Tatum Riley, seems to have the power over him, even when he is at the police station.